The Whitefire Crossing - By Courtney Schafer Page 0,164

from vendor stalls. Homesickness twisted deep within me.

“You Alathians try to make everything safe, and tame,” I said to Lena. “Some of us prefer things wild.” I thought of the stark beauty of the high mountains. Dangerous and unforgiving, yeah, but that was part of their glory.

The carriage pulled to a stop beside another imposing building. No inscriptions marked the gray stone, but an enormous statue of a man with deepset eyes and broad shoulders dominated the courtyard. His face was carved in the serious expression so common to Alathians, his posture commanding. In one hand he held a set of scrolls, and in the other, a complicated looking mechanical device I’d never seen before.

“Let me guess,” I said dryly to Lena. “Denarell of Parthus.”

She nodded, a hint of a smile ghosting about her mouth. She opened the carriage door, and a lot of saluting and crisp orders followed. I slouched back in my seat. I was in no hurry to enter.

All too soon, they escorted me across the stone courtyard and through a massive set of carved wooden doors. We passed through a series of small chambers filled with Alathian soldiers, and then through another set of carved doors that opened on a broad circular chamber with an impossibly high ceiling. Five levels of galleries rose upward in stacked circles along the wall, full of seated men and women in the blue and gray uniforms of mages.

“Khalmet’s hand!” I craned my neck upward. “I didn’t know you Alathians had so many mages.”

“This is almost all of us,” Lena said. “Six of the seven Watches, and all the trainees.”

By my guess, more than a hundred people stood up there. The weight of all those Alathian gazes made my skin itch. “But if you’ve this many mages just in the military—”

“In Alathia, all mages are in the military,” Lena said, a faint note of surprise in her voice.

Kiran had said the Council kept mages leashed tight, but I’d not realized that included forced military enlistment. Any poor bastard who dared to want something different got mind-burned, no doubt.

Lena led me across the floor toward a great stone table in the shape of a half-circle, raised just off the floor level. Thirteen men and women sat behind the table, two wearing the blue and gray of mages, three more in the brown and gray of ordinary military, and the rest in red and gray. Some looked stern, others inscrutable.

Lena stopped some twenty feet from the table and bowed with careful precision. “The Arkennlander Devan na soliin, present for testimony.” Her crisp voice echoed upward through the galleries.

A bald-headed councilor in red and gray inclined his head to her. “Thank you, Watch officer.” He glanced at one of the mages. “Councilor Varellian, are you ready to begin?”

Varellian gave a short nod. She was one of the stern-faced ones, her black hair streaked with gray and the olive skin of her brow etched with deep lines. I wondered how old she was. In Ninavel, I’d never seen a mage with gray hair.

A circular pattern of silver and black sigils marked the floor under my feet. Lena positioned me smack in the center. The sigils began to glow, dimly. I started sweating.

“Is your name Devan na soliin?” Varellian’s brown eyes bored into mine. The mages in the galleries above had gone silent.

“Not really. Just Devan. Or Dev. Only time I use the suffix is when I pass the Kost gate.” Gods. This was more subtle than the heavy pressure I’d felt from Simon. Once I opened my mouth, I couldn’t stop talking.

“What is your trade?”

“Outrider,” I said, shortly. Other answers crowded my tongue. I fought to keep them in. Yet the moment I took a breath, I blurted, “Courier. Smuggler. Former Tainter.” I glanced away from Varellian, and spotted Martennan up on the third gallery level, leaning on the rail with his round face set in serious lines.

“Did you illegally transport the blood mage Kiran ai Ruslanov across the border into Kost?”

Oh, fuck, here it was. “Yes.” This time I didn’t try to stop. “But he doesn’t want to be a blood mage. This was the only place he could think of to escape his master. He won’t do blood magic here, he’ll abide by every one of your stupid rules—”

“Enough,” Varellian said, and my mouth snapped shut. She went on, asking questions about Kiran, Simon, and Ruslan, teasing out the entire tale. Every chance I got, I let myself babble on about what bastards